“If he is your enemy, then he is mine,” I whisper. “Of course, Your Majesty.”

“He would have had you dead on some trumped-up charge of heresy or treason,” the king goes on, ignoring the fact that it would have been his signature on the warrant. “And he would have put his sister in your place. We would have had another Howard queen. I would have had another of their whores thrust into my bed! What do you think of that? How can you bear to think of that?”

I shake my head. Of course there is nothing I can say. Who would have signed the warrant? Who would have sent me to my death? Who would have married the Howard girl?

“You would be dead,” Henry says. “And then at my death the Howards would have commanded my son...” He takes a little breath. “Jane’s son,” he says mistily. “In the grip of the Howard family.”

“But, my lord husband...”

“That was the prize. That’s the prize for them all. That’s what they all want, however they gurn and gloze. They all want command of the regency on my death and control of the new king. That is what I have to defend Edward against. That is what you will defend him against.”

“Of course, husband, you know—”

“Poor Henry Howard,” he says. His voice quavers and the easy tears come quickly. “You know I loved that boy as if he were my own? I remember him as such a beautiful boy playing with Fitzroy. They were like brothers.”

“Can’t he be pardoned?” I ask quietly. “He writes very sorrowfully, I cannot believe that he does not regret...”

He nods his head. ‘I will consider it,’ he says grandly. “If I can pardon him, I will. I will be just. But I will be merciful too. I loved him; and my boy, my beloved Henry Fitzroy, loved him. If I can forgive Howard for the sake of his playmate, then I will.”

* * *

The court is to divide. The king is going to Whitehall to oversee the deaths of the Howards, father and son, and the complete destruction of their treasonous house, and the princesses and I are to go to Greenwich. The Seymours, Thomas and his brother Edward, will stay with the king, help him untangle the plot and name the guilty men. Under the king’s bright suspicious gaze the interrogations of servants, tenants, and enemies are read and reread, and then, I am certain, rewritten. All the vindictive spite that was directed at the reformers, my ladies and me, is now turned, like the mouth of a cannon, towards the Howards, and the great guns are ready to roar. The king’s sentiment, his mercy, his sense of justice, are put aside in an orgy of false evidence. The king wants to kill someone and the court wants to help him.